I found a (lengthy) guide to doing this but it is for gksu which is gone. I have to imagine there’s an easy way. I am running Ubuntu. There is no specific use case, it is just a feature I miss from windows.
EDIT: I always expect a degree of hostility and talking-down from the desktop Linux community, but the number of people in this thread telling me I am using my own computer that I bought with my own money in a way they don’t prefer while ignoring my question is just absurd and frankly should be deeply embarrassing for all of us. I have strongly defended the desktop Linux community for decades, but this experience has left a sour taste in my mouth.
Thank you to the few of you who tried to assist without judgement or assumptions.
That’s a permissions problem not a run as root problem.
That was also my take. If it’s something you should be able to edit, your user should have permissions to do that. Jumping to running as root every time has lots of unintended consequences.
I do think a functionally similar idea would be a button to “take ownership” (grant “/r/w/x”) of a file that would prompt for root password. That way things don’t run as root that shouldn’t. Would that be a good compromise between Linux permissions and Windows workflow?
Regarding formatting a drive, whatever program you are doing that in should ask for root p/w when performing that operation. If it just refuses because of permissions that seems like a bug.